Pop Shield

January 25, 2013

Tellin’ Stories

We had the lovely Tom Burgers in from The Shysters today on Little Sister Radio. He is an utter joy of a man. I’ve bumped into him several times over the years. He’s the kind of guy who immediately feels like a brother.

One year, I had a lovely – if chaotic – birthday when The Shysters came in with rather too much gear and did a loud old session for Barry Bang. Another time, in 2010, I worked with The Shysters at Telly Central when we beamed Tom’s smashing bowl cut to Japan in super-hi definition. This was a pioneering 16x HD quality experimental broadcast which was a precursor for the giant Olympic viewing screens. I cannot think of a better haircut to be shown off by 7680×4320 pixels.

This morning, Tom’s new supergroup of a band are performing songs from his new album for Sunderland’s finest, Laurel La Hardy. I go down to reception and meet everyone. “Saw your thing on InterFace about the thing on Twaddle about falling off your bike into a hedge!”, I say to Tom. “Hilarious!” “Yes, it just took off”, he smiles. “It was true too!” We then start chatting about the touching McFox guy’s wedding speech video song and how that went viral overnight. Then it’s time to head upstairs to Sister Towers and get set up, during which time Toby produces an overripe banana. I discover that Tom and I share a preference for slightly under ripe bananas. As if that isn’t abstract enough, somehow, in the lull before going on air I get stuck into a conversation with Shysters guitarist Colin Marks about how often the sun rises and sun sets at the North Pole. In case you were wondering, here is the answer….

The sun at the North Pole is continuously above the horizon during the summer and continuously below the horizon during the winter. Sunrise is just before the March equinox (around March 19); the sun then takes three months to reach its highest point of near 23½° elevation at the summer solstice (around June 21), after which time it begins to sink, reaching sunset just after the September equinox (around September 24). When the sun is visible in the polar sky, it appears to move in a horizontal circle above the horizon. This circle gradually rises from near the horizon just after the vernal equinox to its maximum elevation (in degrees) above the horizon at summer solstice and then sinks back toward the horizon before sinking below it at the autumnal equinox.

Meanwhile, back on the fourth floor, it’s time to go on air. I go around and ask everyone to turn off their phones. Tom is a Twaddle King and so it is not without some jitteriness that he presses and holds the top button to shut it down.

It’s a charming session, complete with a trio of violins. The only mishap being that someone stands on the switch of the 4-way strip powering the strings headphones amp just before going on air cutting their monitoring feed. Maso Mercury tiptoes in mid-interview to tell us about it, but I misattribute the reason to a different feed issue and the players end up having no option to work acoustically. It doesn’t matter, they play absolutely beautifully anyway and wise old wizard Shane from Alpacas At Altitude guide them safely through it on his nylon string.

Once the transmission is over, we all say our thanks and goodbyes and Tom, ever humble, gathers up all the remaining bags, coats and instrument cases before leaving the room. I can testify to anyone who has ever doubted it, if anyone indeed has, that the man does his fair share of roadie-ing. I have a photo to prove it.

Totes amazeballs, as they say.

There is a little postscript to this story which I picked up on from Tom’s Twaddle feed. Outside on the street, as they leave, a girl approaches him and asks if it would be OK to have a photo. “Of course!” he replies. “Great!” she says, and hands him her camera as she sidles up to jacket-flapper Calvin Jocker. Tom takes the photo. “Thanks Mister!” she says.

Image | December 21, 2012

Xmas lights pass PAT test shocker!

December 18, 2012

Not So Clever

Confusion reigned in the theatre this evening when Jill asked me to head out to the auditorium and check the level of the PA during an audience recording of Cleverclogs.

I enter the auditorium, and at that EXACT moment the theatre working lights spontaneously come up and the PA falls silent.

I rush back to the cubicle to report to Jill what is happening and to find out what might be going on. She doesn’t know, and stabs at various lighting state buttons to no avail. I make a series of swift phone calls to the maintenance engineers, the theatre manager, the Broadcast Manager and the facilities manager. The production team begin to panic, asking what’s going on and when it is going to be fixed. The Cleverclogs panel are left stranded on the stage shouting ad libs at the audience for what I am later stunned to find out is nearly half an hour.

Finally, the producer heads out to the audience to brief them on the situation. Bang on cue, the lights go out and the PA comes back on. We can now get on with the rest of the show, which the audience appear to enjoy about five hundred times more than normal. I end up staying extra late filling out reports and sending emails to talk about what happened. There had been problems in the Fire Control Room in isolating the theatre from some fire PA testing. This caused the theatre to enter a fire alert state. Not a barrel of laughs you might say!

Quote | December 14, 2012

Over And Out

Hello! Yes I can hear the programme! How old are you? I like your voice. You sound about twenty-one! Oh, hello Mr Tickle, you do sound very manly and very in control.

Baffling nonsense spouted during pre-tx ISDN checks with cricketer and commentator Godfrey Bowlcut.

December 13, 2012

As Time Goes By

It comes as a surprise when I realise I’ve been booked to go to art-rocker lounge lizard Ryan Berry’s studios to record an interview. A couple of days beforehand before I go to the Patronising Equipment Centre to book a whole load of equipment and receive the usual abuse. I do, however, manage to walk away with a quality portable recorder, mic stands, cables, back up mics and recorder.

On the morning of the visit, I collect a couple of quality condenser mics from the cupboard and set myself up in a little room to get everything road-tested. I don’t want to be fumbling around stabbing at little grey buttons when I get there.

I head downstairs with the kit and meet producer Mark and DJ Jack Daniel, we jump in a cab and head west. We drive through Marylebone, Notting Hill, past the mansions of Holland Park until we turn down a little mews near to Olympia and step out of the car.

We are presented with a slightly bewildering choice of entrances and doorbells, but then it becomes apparent that the rock star owns the whole side of the street, so we plump for the most likely door and are greeted by an assistant, Milly. She leads us past a massive Warhole picture and big blown-up photos of supermodel Kat Mass downstairs to a huge reception/office/meeting room area. Everything is painted in pale cream with sisal carpets and the space is filled with massive expensive-looking rugs, exquisite antique sofas, colourful artwork.

We are offered tea and a tour. First into a room filled with every vintage keyboard and amplifier you could wish for, then into Ryan’s studio where his engineer is working on a vintage Trident desk with channels numbered from right to left. We are then led into an archive room stuffed chocabloc with shelves of poster tubes and box files of photos and press cuttings. I notice one is sub-titled ‘with and without moustache’. We then head back to reception and wait to be summoned up to Ryan’s quarters. We are informed that Ryan wishes to have a private one-on-one interview with Jack, but Mark the producer insists that I am present in order to quality check the recording. I am very pleased I brought the long cables, so that I don’t have to be too close by.

Upstairs, I am the first to enter a vast brick sequence of adjoining warehouse-type spaces converted into a lounge-study-art library area. We are met by a softly spoken, well-dressed smiling man with his hand extended. I introduce myself and quickly look for a spot to get set up as quickly as possible. Jack and Ryan settle opposite each other on two extremely expensive tasteful sofas. They make small talk as I rush to get the mics set up. Oops, I probably shouldn’t have plonked my little flight case on Ryan’s beautiful couch there! Thankfully I can just plug in and go. I take a bit of level, press record and retreat.

I move an antique office chair around the corner by a partitioning wall so that I can see Johnny, but Ryan cannot see me. I can just see his yellow trews and brown brogues sticking out from behind the wall. It’s like an Alison Jackman photo. It’s one of the most surreal hours of my life, just staring around that vast exquisite library at all the beautiful books and designer shoes and pottery urns, taking rapid-fire photos with my eyes. Next to me sits an antique desk containing an ink blotter with a smart phone and a fountain pen on it, and some scrunched up notelets in the bin. I sit quivering beneath a picture of a pearl earring and praying the dog outside would stop barking.

After an hour Mark and Milly appear and wait silently. The interview eventually draws to a close. Ryan is immediately silently and swiftly out of the room like hot air escaping through an open door on a winter’s day. On the desk his phone has gone, perhaps the only sign that he was really ever there at all. Apart from a pretty nicely recorded 850MB WAV. Phew.

December 5, 2012

Conundrum Countdown

It’s 1915 on a Wednesday evening and I close the faders on the Nations Favourite and scamper over to The Mothership. “You’re in the wrong building!” jests Colin as I present my pass at reception. “So are you!” comes my reply. I head to 70A where I have a seemingly innocuous booking on ABC1 which involves indenting speech miss for a round table discussion programmed Conundrum.

It is ages since I’ve done this one and it feels comfy yet formal. I chat with Philip about his trip to China and about the auto recorder. We test miss and feeds to the headphones and set up the repeat recording and plug in Mark’s ancient TV earpiece thing. In the control room, I notice the studio talkback button looks faulty and phone the maintenance engineers to ask two of them to come and fix it later. Journalist, newsreader and presenter Mark Albike comes in and brandishes crisps at me, this is his normal Wednesday evening routine. Off mic/camera, come to think of it, I have never once seen this man without a bag of crisps in his hands.

It is only once Mark is settled in his seat with one minute to go to the live trail that he comments that he can hear everything happening in the cubicle in his headpiece. Not good. We hush the gathered troops for the trail. Once that’s past, we have fifteen minutes until on air to set about fixing the talkback. We reset the desk with no effect – beyond having to dial in a shed load of mic settings again. I call the maintenance engineers back and Andy and his colleague appears. He stabs at the talkback key with a screwdriver to no avail. I unplug the talkback mic and Phillip wiggles the loudspeaker DIM knob. The talkback resets itself. Phew. As soon as the programme is safely on air, I trot off into the winter darkness.

November 21, 2012

Friendly Fire

I am working on the Manchester and Liverpool legs of a ‘live’ tour with Bucket FM. ‘Live’ as in simultaneously live to radio, TV, Internet and arena-sized audiences.

Crossing into a live stage show on TV in the middle of a radio show is always going to present cueing difficulties. It needs a really clear chain of authoritative command presiding over the proceedings with an excellent network of communications and contingencies in place. A military operation if you like. And if the soldiers aren’t properly briefed, well, there are going to be some casualties on your hands.

The problems often start when the performing artist is not completely in the picture, or doesn’t ‘get it’, maybe doesn’t care – not to mention wardrobe malfunctions, in-ear monitor problems, instrument faults and so on. The last time I experienced a hitch along these lines it was because Damian Allbarge from Wibble had randomly wandered off at the wrong moment to clean his teeth. There were similar problems on Ronan O’Riley’s show in Aberdeen trying to get Mooby to STOP playing. This time we are in Liverpool, and it is rapper Devilish’s turn to hold up the proceedings. Devilish wasn’t actually present for soundcheck, which doesn’t bode well, although his band were. His ‘band’ being more of a score of session musicians, if that’s the collective term. Or a herd perhaps? As in ‘a herd of cats’ rather than ‘a herd of sheep’. As we witness later in the story. For now, you can picture them wandering around a vast backstage area catching mice.

So, it’s ten minutes to showtime and the stage seems disconcertingly lifeless. The audience are in. The radio show is on air with presenters on long range radio mics wandering around that vast backstage world interspersed with records played from base. Devilish’s monitor engineer reappears and switches on his radio mics. Immediately I can hear in my headset that there is interference all over the main vocal mic. The guy tries to sort it out and, in the meantime, I arrange for a spare wired mic to be run out in case of problems on the main RF mic during the show. Before I know it, it’s showtime.

Working out what the heck is going on in your headset in a really noisy venue is an art in itself. Over the din of the stage and PA you’ve got to sort out the talkback between monitors and house, local and distant production, stage and truck, over the outputs of the truck music desk, truck broadcast desk and cue from base.

At the prearranged time, in my headset I hear a voice [production] cueing a run-up CD track from the DJ decks on stage which is to lead up to Devilish’s set. It doesn’t start. A voice [truck] “We don’t have the decks”. A third voice [base] “I’ve got a record standing by”. A fourth voice [production] “They didn’t start the CD because the band weren’t ready, go to music”. And a fifth [presenter] ”we apologise for technical difficulties in Liverpool this evening, in the meantime here’s a record…” A sixth [production] “OK, now we have a band”.

By this time there is a filler record from base being played on the radio. But in car crash style, the band, having been successfully rounded up, somehow all run on stage and start playing to rapturous applause. Another voice [production] “the band have gone on!” But of course, the venue is no longer live to air so now the broadcast now has to catch up with the band.

And we’re off. I notice somebody running out to rescue a keyboard in the middle of the stage belonging to a guest vocalist which was not removed after soundcheck. It then becomes apparent that Devilish missed the soundcheck because he is ill, and his voice had failed. He is completely hoarse and can barely speak. Nobody thought to mention this to us, nor explain that a clean vocal would magically appear on Track 7 which was silent during soundcheck. The official line was ‘Track 7 probably won’t be used’. Luckily Guy has it on his desk and faded up. Phew!

Then it’s time for the guest singer to come on stage to sing on Devilish’s new single. During soundcheck she had been persuaded to MIME playing the keyboard to a piano line coming from one of the playback tracks. She was pretty reluctant in case she would look stupid, but as she was making quite a fuss over things nobody seemed to be paying attention.

The tech is late in bringing the keyboard back on in time for the song. The guest artist is announced to rapturous applause and then awkwardly stands while her vocal mic is placed. The backing track starts early and so she has no option but to start miming at the keyboard. The tech runs off but over the far side of the stage I can see the central joint of the vocal mic stand is loose and the boom arm is starting to slip downwards. No one is coming to her rescue. I consider it, but there are too many obstacles to get out there in time. What should she do? Take her hands off the keys and raise the vocal mic but expose the miming. Or carry on pretending to play the keys and risk losing the live vocal? She makes the only choice – fixes the vocal, to hell with the keys. She was right, she was made to look stupid.

And there we have it. One casualty of friendly fire on the stage, a couple of injuries in the truck and a few bodies strewn about backstage. That’s about the extent of the damage. For what it’s worth, the radio mics remain stable. This has been a skirmish, but not on the scale of The Grand Battle of Crayzee last July.

If that [£25] doesn’t cover it, let me know and I’ll dosh you up senseless.

Presenter sends operative out for emergency chocolate.